However, his importance in the history of linguistics is based mainly on his development of an approach to the syntax of natural languages that would become known as dependency grammar.

He studied Latin, Greek, and German in school, spent time abroad as a young man in England, Germany, and Italy.

He studied with Joseph Vendryes, and attended lectures at the Collège de France by Antoine Meillet, the most prominent French linguist of the first half of the 20th century.

In 1920 Tesnière was invited as a lecturer in French to the University of Ljubljana (now the capital of Slovenia), where he wrote his doctoral thesis on the disappearance of the dual in Slovenian.

During World War II Tesnière worked as a cryptography officer for the Military Intelligence, the so-called Deuxième Bureau.

His primary oeuvre, Éléments de syntaxe structurale, was then published five years later in 1959 due to the constant efforts of his wife Jeanne and the help of colleagues and friends.

The following areas are touched on: (1) connections, (2) autonomous syntax, (3) verb centrality, (4) stemmas, (5) centripetal (head-initial) and centrifugal (head-final) languages, (6) valency, (7) actants and circonstants, and (8) transfer.

[7] In so doing, he was promoting a break from a tradition in linguistics that focused on concrete forms such as affixes and the inflectional paradigms associated with the study of the languages of antiquity (Latin and Greek).

Tesnière argued that the study of syntax should not be limited to the examination of concrete forms, but rather one has to acknowledge and explore the connections (as just described above).

He pointed to the key concept of innere Sprachform 'inner speech form' established by Wilhelm von Humboldt.

[8] Since innere Sprachform (i.e. the connections) is abstract, one cannot acknowledge it and explore the central role that it plays in syntax by focusing just on concrete forms.

[9] He emphasized that while the sentence is nonsensical, it is well-formed from a syntactic point of view, for the forms of the words and their order of appearance are correct.

Noam Chomsky later made the same point with his famous sentence Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

The central issue is in language cognition which is elementary for Chomsky who claims that syntax is an innate psychological phenomenon.

In contrast, Tesnière's concept of autonomy of syntax, or antinomy between structural and linear order, is fully non-psychological.

Tesnière relied heavily on tree-like diagrams to represent the understanding of sentence structure and syntax that he was pursuing.

A speaker first conceives of what he/she wants to say, whereby this conception consists of words organized hierarchically in terms of connections (structural order).

Given the hierarchical organization of syntactic units that he posited (and represented using stemmas), Tesnière identified centripetal and centrifugal structures.

[18] But if one does choose to reflect word order in the stemmas, then the distinction between centrifugal vs. centripetal structures that Tesnière established is clearly visible.

In particular, various phenomena of diathesis (active, passive, reflexive, reciprocal, recessive) are sensitive to the underlying valency of verbs.

Actants are known as arguments, and circumstants as adjuncts, so again, Tesnière identified and explored key concepts that are now a mainstay in the modern study of syntax.

The following stemmas represent the phrase de Pierre 'of Peter' and the sentence Écrivez dans le livre de votre ami 'Write in the book of your friend': The translative and the word that it transfers are placed equi-level and a vertical dividing line separates them.

Tesnière's legacy resides primarily with the widespread view that sees his Éléments as the starting point and impetus for the development of dependency grammar.

As stated above, a number of the key concepts that he developed (e.g. valency, arguments vs. adjuncts, head-initial vs head-final languages) are cornerstones of most modern work in the field of syntax.

Tesnière died shortly before the initiation of generative grammar, and his Éléments remained untranslated to English until 2015.